Production line management encompasses a set of planning tools to manage the demands for a production line, in support of lean manufacturing concepts. The tools in production line management serve as an alternative planning method to create and monitor production schedules, allowing you to retrieve aggregate demands, analyze operational impacts, and build trial production schedules. When you generate production schedules in this manner, you will usually make proposal generation unavailable using other planning tools such as Master Scheduling, and for MRP, by indicating Do Not Release on the Proposal Release option for the associated inventory parts. Production schedules can also be generated through Kanban replenishment signals, or directly generated in response to a customer order demand.
If you want, you can use a mixture of production schedules and shop orders as a mixed-mode approach within a single site. For example, the final assembly could be Make-to-Order through shop orders, with the major sub-assemblies managed through Make-to-Stock repetitive schedules, and the component production perhaps based on kanban pull signals.
Demand is the main planning consideration for production line management, with a goal of organizing the work centers and production tasks, such that the production rates are synchronized with demand rates for the mix of products on the line. You can compare the takt time for a sampled demand period on the line to one or more alternative routings for the products, to determine if the line operation durations can meet the demand rate within the existing working hours. The demand sources for a production line can be retrieved from one or more of the MRP, master scheduling, customer order, production scheduling (component demands from another line), and customer scheduling planned demands.
Proposed schedules can be generated using several different loading routines and then adjusted manually as desired. Defining a production line run rate can be important, as it implies a daily production limit or an optimum for total unit production of all the products on the line. The line rate is used by several of the production schedule load methods as a capacity limit.